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While all the previously described metric systems have easy protocols, they tend to stay in Sysadmin/Operations land. But you should not stop there. There is a lot more to track than CPU,Memory and Disk metrics. This blogpost is about metrics up the stack: at the Application Middleware, Application and the User Usage.

To the cloud

Application Metrics

Maybe grumpy sysadmins have scared the developers and business to the cloud. It seems that the space of Application metrics, whether it's Ruby, Java , PHP is being ruled today by New Relic In a blogpost New Relic describes serving about 20 Billion Metrics A day.

It's incredible to see the power and simplicity of this; I've created a simple Proof of Concept to extract the statsd metrics on ZeroMQ in this experimental fork

MetricsD https://github.com/tritonrc/metricsd tries to marry both Etsy's statsD and the Coda Hale / Yammer's Metrics Library for the JVM and puts the data into Graphite. It should be drop-in compatible with Etsy's statsd, although with added explicit support for meters (with the m type) and gauges (with the g type) and introduce the h (histogram) type as an alias for timers (ms).

Another tool worth mentioning for tracking endusers is HummingBird - http://hummingbirdstats.com/ . It is NodeJS based an allows for realtime web traffic visualization. To send metrics is has a very simple UDP protocol.

Conclusion

It's exciting to see the cross over between both development, operations and business. Up until now only New Relic has a very well integrated suite for all metrics. Hope the internal solutions catch up.

Now that we have all that data, it's time to talk about dashboards and visualization. On to the next blogpost.

If you are using other tools, have ideas, feel free to add them in the comments.